Backward readers’ awareness of language: Strengths and weaknesses

An important, though somewhat neglected, aspect of learning to spell in English and in many other orthographies is that children have to learn about the conventional spellings for morphemes which often depart from strict letter-sound principles. There is some evidence that backward readers might have great difficulties with these spellings. We looked at a group of backward readers’ (BR) spelling of “ed” in regular past verbs and “wh” in interrogatives, and also at their grammatical awareness and we compared them to one control group matched on chronological age (CA) and to another matched on reading level (RL). The backward readers were considerably behind the CA controls in producing grammatically based spelling patterns correctly and also in the grammatical awareness tasks, but no worse than the RL controls in either of these domains: in fact they were better with the “wh” spellings. We conclude that learning the written language makes a significant contribution to the development of grammatical awareness and this interferes with BR progress in grammatical awareness when they are compared to their cohort. However, there is no evidence of an intrinsic difficulty with grammatical awareness among BR and perhaps this strength could be used to support their spelling.